Of Others Inside: Insanity, Addiction And Belonging in America

4. Canyon House

4 Canyon House Though Canyon House was certainly a product of the histories outlined in Part I, it was also the site of distinctive patterns of practice that were by no means inevitable effects of those histories. History was, instead, mediated through embodied strategies, artfully articulated by specific people who, for different reasons, found Canyon House a compelling resource. In this chapter I discuss the organization and operation of Canyon House, linking these to the broader events discussed in Part I. More specifically, I describe the program’s local history, its administrative structures, the distinctive logic of therapeutic practice, and finally, when and how putative others inside people were made to figure as embodied causal agents within the local social context that was Canyon House. The Origins of Canyon House In 1985, Brad Peterson had been an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) for five years.1 He was also a consultant with the California Association of Alcoholic Recovery Homes (CAARH). In this capacity he advised state, county, and city officials, and helped private citizens negotiate the maze of licensing, funding, and other administrative exigencies of operating recovery homes for alcoholics in California. CAARH was the preeminent organization in California representing alcoholism treatment professionals who did not abide by strictly medical or psychiatric models of care. Though much of CAARH’s support came from AA members, its agenda consisted less in promoting AA itself, than insuring the political viability of what they called “social model’’recovery programs in the increasingly competitive alcoholism treatment industry described in Chapter 3. Toward this end, CAARH established and promoted standards of practice for their member recovery homes, lobbied county and state bureaucrats on the virtues of social model programs, 1. This section is based primarily on an extensive interview with the founder and director of Canyon House and CEO of Social Model Treatment Group, Inc. (the nonprofit parent corporation of Canyon House). 95 96 Chapter 4 and educated others in the field regarding the distinctive merits of social model recovery approaches (Wiener 1981). While with CAARH, Peterson was contacted by Doug Mailer, a wealthy southern California businessman and a committed member of AA. Mailer had recently purchased a 32-bed, single-room occupancy (SRO) hotel and sought to convert it into a social model recovery home. He told Peterson he did not want to run the home himself but hoped to bring in the county and/or one of the local nonprofit corporations already involved in alcoholism treatment to do so. Peterson phoned Norman Benson, director of the Los Angeles county Office of Alcohol Programs (OAP), and told him of Mailer’s plan. Benson told Peterson that county seed money was available but that he must persuade the local county supervisor of the wisdom in taking advantage of Mailer’s generosity. Peterson did just that, $50,000 was released from the county coffers, and Mailer’s SRO hotel was converted into a recovery home just as he had hoped. Following this success, Mailer told Peterson that if he ever needed capital for a like venture, he should not hesitate to call. Peterson had already been considering founding and running his own program and Mailer’s offer further kindled his thoughts. To get a preliminary sense of his options, Peterson did a needs assessment survey of Los Angeles county. Following the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, what he found were rather fallow grounds. The only new programs that promised much hope for support were those designed to serve a handful of “special populations’’ who were demonstratively underserved within the existing systems. The special populations then attracting most concern were pregnant women, women with young children, and juveniles, but Peterson felt he had little experience with these populations. He felt better equipped to confront the needs of another special population that had been attracting increasing attention in Los Angeles county—the mentally ill.2 The Los Angeles chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) had been growing in both size and political clout throughout the early eighties. Reflecting the national trends discussed in Chapter 3, NAMI’s Los Angeles chapter persistently complained to county officials that mentally ill substance 2. Before consulting for CAARH, Peterson had been a counselor in a recovery home for alcoholics and drug addicts. While there, he became convinced that people whose mental problems were not confined to addiction were very poorly served in such programs. He had, in fact, attributed...